


Learning How to Live Again

by Ace_of_Spades_400



Series: The Last Standing [2]
Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Canonical Character Death, Drug Use, F/M, Funerals, I love Bobby I swear, Loss, Rose is a queen and we stan, Therapy, twenty five years
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:14:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27185029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ace_of_Spades_400/pseuds/Ace_of_Spades_400
Summary: His brothers are dead. This is Bobby's life over the course of the next twenty-five years. His career, his family, his loss.
Relationships: Bobby | Trevor Wilson/Original Female Character, Bobby/ therapy
Series: The Last Standing [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1977262
Comments: 9
Kudos: 65





	Learning How to Live Again

Bobby is not entirely aware of the next few hours. He’s talking, he knows that. He’s answering the questions of the nurses and the police officers and Rose but he’s not aware of any of the words coming out of his mouth.

At some point, a nurse with a face he cannot remember presses three necklaces into his clenched fist and he holds tight to them, stares at them and nothing else as the world shifts around him.

He looks at Luke’s necklace and pales. “I gotta… I gotta tell their parents.” He hears himself say. He cannot even imagine doing so. How can he look Emily in the eye after all the times he lied and said he didn’t know where Luke was? How can he tell her that her son is dead? That Bobby wasn’t there with him, in the end. That he left him. That….

“Don’t worry son,” an officer is saying, hand on his shoulder. Bobby’s skin crawls, itches, burns, at the contact. “We’ve already sent a car out to your friends’ homes.”

Bobby does not remember giving them the addresses of his friends’ parents.

Parents. God. His parents. He should probably call them. He should call them right? That’s what you were supposed to do when bad things happened. Kids called their parents when they were upset.

Whenever Bobby was upset he called Alex or Luke or Reggie. But now the three of them were dead. They were dead and Bobby would never see them again, would never make music with them again. They’d never gotten to play the Orpheum.

“The van…” he gasps, shaking so badly the necklaces in his grip rattle together, “Meredith she’s… she’s still at the theatre. Reggie will- she can’t… I need to…” (Reggie would never care about Meredith again)

Rose presses her hand to his back, takes it immediately away when he recoils from the touch, “I’ll take care of it, don’t worry. Come on, I’ll take you home.”

Home is the studio. Home is the boys. Home is gone.

He does not remember the drive to his parents house. He must give Rose the address because he gets there, but he is not aware of anything. One second he’s sitting in the hospital waiting room and the next he’s sitting in the living room, on the rarely used couch he’d always hated the color of. Luke had always said it looked like baby vomit. (Luke would never say that again)

His parents are pressed too close to him, touching him, telling him lies like ‘they love him’ and ‘things will be ok’. They likely would not be able to pick his friends’ faces out of a crowd. They don’t even know the name of his band. Bobby wants to scream about how they’ve never cared before, how they’d fucked him up so much he hadn’t ever been able to properly hug his friends and now he never would. He wants Alex to push everyone else out of the room so Bobby can breathe. (But Alex will never do that again.)

Rose is gone, her phone number scribbled on a napkin and stuffed into his back pocket. Bobby lasts exactly thirty-six minutes with his parents crowding him before he bolts.

He runs until his lungs burn and his legs ache and he can’t see through the tears streaming down his face. He runs until he’s at the studio, until he’s home, and he falls face forward into Luke’s couch and pulls Reggie’s pillow into his chest and Alex’s spare hoodie over his body like a blanket. And he grips the necklaces they’d worn for years now, that they’d hardly ever taken off, in his fist like a lifeline. And he cries.

Eventually, when the sun is starting to rise and Bobby’s tears have run out, the garage doors burst open and Dani rushes in. She’s still in her pajamas, her feet are bare. There’s blood on her knees from where she fell in her rush to get off her bike to get here as fast as she did. Her eyes are big and she’s so afraid right now, her hands shaking.

“It’s not true.” She whispers, “Tell me it isn’t true. Where’s Alex?”

How do you tell your best friend’s twelve-year-old little sister that he’s dead?

He’s not sure what his face does, but he watches as Dani’s expression crumples, as the tears start falling. She drops down into the armchair beside him, knees tucked up to her chest, looking so incredibly small and breakable.

Bobby should hug her, should hold her and tell her the same lies he has been told, that she’ll be alright, that she’s not alone. But he can’t. He can’t….

So instead he sits there as his hands shake and Dani cries and he wishes his brothers were here instead of him.

The funerals happen in quick succession.

Luke’s is first, he’s always first. It’s a beautiful sunny Friday afternoon and Emily Patterson is wailing in misery beside her son’s open casket. Bobby sits in the front row of the church and thinks of every time she begged to know where Luke was. His father is barely holding himself together, his shoulders shaking as he tries to hold his wife up off the floor as her knees continue to give out. Bobby cannot look at them. 

Alex is second, always right at Luke’s back. It’s an overcast Saturday morning and the air is surprisingly chilly. Mr. Joyner cannot look at his son’s face and Mrs. Joyner cannot look at her husband. They will live the rest of their lives knowing that at the end, their son had not known if he was truly loved by them. Dani is too quiet and too still between her parents, eyes filled with fire. She will call her parents liars and cowards and fools and the funeral will end in tears.

Reggie is last, never wanting to intrude. It’s a rainy dark Sunday evening, and his parents had not bothered to rent a church. So instead Bobby and the depressingly small crowd stand huddled under umbrellas as Reggie is lowered into the cold dark earth. His parents scream the whole time, blaming each other for everything. Not even at their son’s funeral could they pretend to care about him. Bobby wants to scream at them, but instead he marches home in the rain and lets it soak him.

He goes back to the garage because that’s where he’s been sleeping the last week. But now, after having watched the last of his best friends being buried, he feels like he’s going to throw up.

The studio is too quiet, too empty, too dead. Bobby can’t….

He can’t ever come back here, not without the boys. He packs quickly, not paying much attention to what he’s grabbing. One of Alex’s hoodies, Luke’s notebooks, Reggie’s CD collection, a beanie he thinks was probably Luke’s but they’d all insisted was theirs. 

He hesitates when he reaches for his guitar, hands shaking. In the end, he leaves without it.

He leaves everything else in the hands of the old woman they’d rented the garage from, who promises to take care of it for him. Bobby throws the single box of things he’d gathered into Meredith’s trunk and leaves the studio behind.

Two days later he comes back from school to find Dani sitting on his bed, Alex’s lucky pair of drumsticks in her hands, his own guitar laying on the bed beside her. She stares at him and he stares back. They sit together in silence as Dani tries to figure out how to twirl the sticks between her fingers.

The house gets a lot of calls over the next few months. Reporters wanting the story about the Sunset Curve tragedy. They show up at his school asking for interviews. His name is splashed over hundreds of shitty tabloids. Bobby Wilkes, the lone survivor. 

Three days after his eighteenth birthday he changes his name to Trevor Wilson and moves into the city. He doesn’t bring much with him, there isn’t a lot from his childhood that he cherishes anymore. His guitar comes even though he cannot bring himself to so much as touch it, let alone play. He hangs his brothers’ necklaces from a hook by his bedside and stares at them every night he does not sleep.

It is not hard to go by a different name, like he had thought it might be. In all ways but one Bobby Wilkes had died with his friends. It’s easier to be Trevor, who doesn’t care about anything anymore.

Dani takes a bus into the city most afternoons to sit in his apartment. She’s fighting with her parents more often than not, and Trevor tries not to think of Reggie whenever he sees her hands shaking but he cannot help it.

A year goes by slowly, painfully. Trevor gets a shitty job at a coffeeshop to make ends meet and tries to ignore that aching thing inside of him that calls out for his family. He spends a lot of time with Rose, who seems to have appointed herself as the one responsible for making sure he lives through another year.

Trevor would be lying if he said he didn’t wish every morning that he would have died that night as well. He spends many sleepless nights staring at the ceiling wondering if they’re waiting for him to join them. If he should stop being a coward and just do it.

But Rose is there and she smiles and she does not touch him as she drags him to her apartment to listen to records of bands he’s never heard of, to albums that never got big, and he tries to remind himself that music had once made him happy, made him feel alive instead of dead.

At nineteen he finally picks up his guitar again, at two-fifteen in the morning. His fingers ache, two years out of practice, and the only song he finds himself able to play is one of theirs, one of Luke’s. He’s crying by the end, shaking so hard his fingers slip off the strings, but he’s smiling too. God he’d missed music.

He goes back to his parents place to pick up some of his equipment he’d left behind, carefully not looking at Meredith still parked in their driveway, gathering dust. He packs up his amp and his cords, having awkward, stilted small talk with his parents about how he’s playing again.

They’ve been trying the last two years to be parents. Sending him home cooked meals and presents and trying to be involved in his life. It’s ages too late for that honestly, but Bobby does not blame them for what happens next.

They’re just trying to help him, he knows. They just want to invest in his passions like they hadn’t before he’d lost everything. They want to be good parents now.

He doesn’t blame them for thinking the notebook is his. Because the notebook they’d found in his room full of lyrics HAD been his, once. It had his name in the cover and two and a half pages of history notes before he’d given it away to Luke so the boy would stop scribbling in the margins of his already full notebook. And Bobby’s handwriting had been nearly as bad as Luke’s, so he does not blame his parents for not noticing the difference.

And he doesn’t blame them for not knowing anything about the music industry, about how rough it could be. They didn’t know that Sunset Curve had worked so hard for so long to become popular so that they’d have bargaining power with music execs. That too often in this industry musicians were chewed up and spit out under bad contracts. That everyone in the LA area knew Chill Records was a garbage record label with a history of theft and screwing over artists.

They don’t realize what they’re doing when they sell the two and a half notebooks full of song lyrics to Chill Records in exchange for a contract for their son.

Trevor knows exactly what it means.

Louis Grayson is a sleazeball and a sorry excuse for a human being. He’s also now Trevor’s manager/owner. 

The contract it a disgusting pile of garbage. Chill Records owns every song in those notebooks, and as long as Trevor signs their contract and a twenty-year gag-order on Sunset Curve, he gets to be the one to sing them. They make it very clear, if he ever steps out of line, if he ever even thinks about telling someone that Luke Patterson wrote those songs, then all of those precious lyrics go to another artist on their list.

And Trevor cannot let anyone else sing Luke’s songs. Never. Those are their songs, if the world is going to hear them then it’s going to be from him.

He screams about it for three hours straight standing in the hills just outside Hollywood. Rose on one side and Dani on the other, pissed off and resigned in equal measure.

“Twenty years and then everyone will know. They can’t keep you quiet after that.” Rose says, expression hard

“Luke did always say it was more about the music than the fame.” Dani says, looking out over the city

Trevor changes his phone number and tells his parents he moved apartments even though he didn’t.

The next year is rough, almost as rough as the year after...

It is hard to sing the songs he had once loved so much knowing that he is stealing them. More and more nights he finds himself sleepless and alone, wishing desperately that he had been the one to die instead. When he does sleep all he can see is Luke, furious, asking him why. He starts drinking, just so that he can pass out to get a few precious hours of dreamless, un-haunted sleep. 

Dani sleeps on his couch most days now, and Rose’s others. Trevor does not know how to ask if she’s run away or not, if she’s still going to school. He doesn’t say anything at all when he stops seeing her dance bag sitting in the middle of the kitchen.

Instead he stocks his freezer with frozen bags of vegetables for the split knuckles she comes home with and lets her lay on his floor, high as a kite and laughing too loud as she twirls Alex’s drumsticks between her fingers.

But the music is good- of course it is, it’s Luke’s- and suddenly Trevor is hearing his own name wherever he goes. His music (Luke’s music) is playing on every local radio station, people are recognizing him and asking for his autograph and his picture. Trevor smiles and laughs and plays up this image of brooding bad boy for the public to hide the fact that he cannot fucking stand the sight of himself in those pictures.

His paychecks start coming through and he debates for a long time before deciding that even if he cannot tell anyone, the music is not just his and so neither is the money. He splits it up into four equal parts.

He uses his portion of the money for rent and food alcohol. On buying a nice, decorated little hook stand for the necklaces beside his bed.

Alex’s portion goes into a savings account with Dani’s name on it, for when she turns eighteen. 

Reggie’s parents aren’t getting a fucking dime from him, not after what they did, so Reggie’s portion goes to local charities that help abused kids and runaways and music programs for underprivileged schools.

Luke’s portion goes into an envelope with his name on the front. And every six months Trevor pulls together enough courage to take it to the Patterson’s house. He never has enough to knock, to look Emily in the eye, to tell her what he has done and what her son deserves. Instead he leaves it in her mailbox and runs home to drink himself to sleep.

He gets a bigger apartment, a two bedroom, and pretends not to notice when Dani quietly moves her things into the second room one backpack-full at a time.

Rose continues to come over and mother him as much as he can bear. They sit on the couch and write songs for a band she can never pick a name for and he will never be allowed to sing.

At twenty-three he books his first country-wide tour. Grayson sends him a congratulatory fruit basket and Trevor lights it on fire on his balcony.

Dani, freshly eighteen and between two dead end minimum wage jobs, gleefully drops her suitcase on her mattress when she hears the news.

“I’m coming with, duh.” She grins, sharp, eyes only a little unfocused. 

The tour bus is cramped and brings back too many memories of sleeping in the garage. Trevor curls up in his bed each day and twists the three necklaces he’d wrapped around his wrist until his arm burns and he fears Reggie’s beaded one will snap.

But as much as he hates himself most days, hates this person he has become, he still loves music. Being onstage, singing again, singing these songs that he has always known, that is the only time he ever truly feels alive.

He tries to ignore the nights that Dani disappears and does not come back for a very long time. The way she sways and her eyes are red in the morning, the way her arms are covered in bruises from needles. He does not know what he can say, when he is spending most of his nights drinking himself into oblivion.

The tour goes great. His face is on every music magazine and his name is on everyone’s lips and his music is on every radio across the country.

But Luke’s songs are drying up. They’ve released four albums and two singles and there’s only a handful of songs left to steal. 

They don’t like Trevor’s songs as much, that’s fine. He was never as much of a writer anyhow, but it’ll last for one last album.

Trevor insists on saving one song for last, a single, something special.

‘My Name is Luke’ is one of the best songs Trevor Wilson has ever released. People talk about it for months, the meaning, the symbolism, the raw emotion of the song.

Trevor puts all of the money for this one into an envelope and puts it in the Patterson’s mailbox.

He cannot tell them that this is Luke’s song, that Luke had loved them so much, that he had wanted to go home so badly but didn’t know how to apologize. That he’d written his mother a song he had been going to sing her one day when they’d made it.

Trevor would have never forgiven himself if Chill Records had gotten ahold of ‘Unsaid Emily’. Only Luke could sing that song.

But he hopes the Pattersons see ‘My Name is Luke’ and they know, somewhere inside of them, that their son had written it. That he would have made it so incredibly big.

He goes on another tour, Dani follows him again. 

At the end of it, after five long years of this bullshit, Trevor Wilson’s contract with Chill Records is up and all of Sunset Curve’s songs have been used. Grayson smiles and asks him about renewing for another album.

Trevor punches him in the face on his way out the door. Later, Dani will egg his house.

Rose points him in the direction of another agency with a much better reputation, and Silver Studios practically fall over themselves to sign him.

They all think his newer works aren’t as good as his ‘original’ stuff, but Trevor doesn’t tell them the truth. He still has fifteen years left to wait. Instead he pours as much as he can into his own music, tells interviewers they aren’t allowed to ask about his music before Silver, and pretends it never happened at all.

Rose introduces them to a guy she’d met, Ray, who looks at Rose like she’d hung the moon in the sky and has a terrible sense of humor and even worse style. Rose has never looked happier than the day he asked her to marry him.

Trevor never saw this coming.

It’s his first tour since signing with Silver, smaller route, smaller venues, but better for all that Trevor is singing his own music for once in his life.

Dani had come along as she always had, laughing whenever girls threw themselves at him after shows and cheering louder than anyone when the music started.

They’re in Dallas for three days playing a shitty concert hall with a name he can no longer remember and an audience that’s too drunk to even really notice which of the seven artists performing tonight he is. 

But after the show Trevor is trying to drink himself unconscious like he always does, ignoring the yelling crowd that pushes far too close for comfort. And then some douchebag with too many tattoos and an ego the size of the fucking sun struts up and gets in his face, pissed off about… something, honestly Trevor is too far gone to really care.

But he’s calling him all kinds of things, insults Trevor has heard a thousand times before in his own fucking head, poser and loner and nobody and worthless and fake and-

Dani is between him and the fuckface before Trevor can blink, eyes gone manic and sharp in a way he hasn’t seen since she started doping herself up. “Don’t you fucking dare talk to him like that.” She spits, and then sucker punches the guy in the dick.

By the time Trevor drags her back to the bus, Dani’s face is black and blue but she’s grinning, missing a tooth and spitting blood when she says, “I’m the only fucker who can talk to you like that.”

Oh. Trevor thinks to himself as he lays in his bunk that night. He’s very in love with her.

It’s weird, in a lot of ways. One, Dani is currently his best friend. Two, Dani is the little sister of his dead best friend. Three, Dani very clearly does not feel even remotely similar in any capacity.

But it’s ok, because if there’s one thing Trevor Wilson is very good at its burying shit inside of himself and refusing to deal with it.

Which works really good for about two weeks until he wakes up from a blackout drunk night to a motel room he does not remember, naked, with Dani sprawled like a starfish half on top of him.

They don’t speak about it for the rest of the tour. They don’t speak about it until they’re home again and Rose’s magical wedding is over, and the apartment is dark and quiet and they’re alone.

“So I think I’m pregnant.” She says.

Trevor has never imagined himself as a father. Has never imagined having a kid. He can’t imagine he’d be very good at it, not with the way he was raised. Not with the way he is. But also… Also…. 

“Are you going to keep it?” he asks her, thinking of Luke and Reggie and Alex and their parents, how much better Trevor could do, how he could try, how he could love this kid to make up or all the love his brothers and him never got.

“I don’t…” Dani is only twenty years old. She’s a drug addict. She doesn’t have a job. She does not love Trevor. All very good reasons to get rid of it. Trevor would not blame her, if she did. He would go with her, would hold her hand, would never speak of it again if she wanted. This is her choice, as much as he may want her to say yes, it’s hers to decide. “I think so.” She says after a long time thinking, “Maybe.”

He asks her to marry him right there, with a piece of tinfoil he found under the couch that he bends into the rough shape of a ring. She laughs, putting it onto her finger. She does not kiss him, he does not ask her to. As much as he loves her, the touch would still make his skin crawl.

And that is what makes Trevor realize. He can’t do this. Not anymore. He cannot live his life unable to hold his kid, unable to tell them how much he loved them. He had missed out with his brothers, never again.

That night he goes through the apartment and dumps every last bottle of alcohol down the drain. Dani huffs and puffs but follows his lead, emptying out her stashes into a takeout bag for him to dispose of.

He calls Rose in the morning and within an hour she’s connected him to a therapist nearby, one Ray had highly recommended.

He finally talks about Bobby Wilkes. About Sunset Curve. About his brothers. About his parents and the way he cannot touch people, cannot speak to them. Cannot connect. He talks about Dani and Rose and how their touch burns him. How he has never been able to reach out. How he loves so much but does not have the ability to show it. How he never hugged his best friends before they died. How he wishes he were dead still, most days.

It’s a long, slow road. Painful, most days. But worth it.

Worth it for the day he pulls Rose into a hug and finally thanks her for everything she has done for him, for being there, for being with him through all of his bullshit. 

Worth it when he can finally pull Dani in close and tell her he really, truly loves her but he understands that she doesn’t feel the same. That he’ll always love her anyways.

On January 13, 2004, Trevor holds Carolyn Alexandra Wilson in his arms, and for the first time since he was seventeen, everything is alright.

No matter what happens in this life, Trevor will do anything for his little girl.

Two months later Rose gives birth to a little girl of her own, to Juliana Sofia Molina. He looks at Rose, the woman who has looked after him for almost a decade now, and knows that these two girls are going to be friends. They’re going to be sisters.

He buys a big house a few streets over, a mansion really, to live up to that image he’s created so no one looks too closely at how he’s still more than a little broken inside. He continues to go see his therapist, to write songs, to live.

He gets Meredith out of the storage locker she’s been in for so long and parks her in the big empty garage. He puts his brother’s necklaces on the wall of his home office and touches them every time he goes to write a song. He mounts Alex’s drumsticks on a shelf in the living room where Dani can see them every day. 

He imagines how his brothers would feel about this house, this life, this family he has now.

He spends a lot of afternoons in the Molina household watching Julie and Carrie crawl after one another and babble nonsensically at each other and throw their mashed food all over. 

(Trevor does not tell Rose that the house Ray had bought had belonged to an old woman who had rented out her garage to a group of teenage musicians. He does not tell her that he left so much of their stuff behind. He sticks to the house he had never been inside of before and tries not to let himself think of what could have been left behind in the garage.)

Trevor loves Carrie so much more than he’d ever imagined possible. She’s so perfect, so wonderful. He honestly can’t understand how his parents were so messed up, to not love their child like he loves his.

He buys her everything, even living on one-fourth of a paycheck it’s more money than he’ll ever need. He buys her toys and clothes and books and music. He takes her to parks and museums and movies. He holds her hand when they walk side-by-side and carries her on his hip around the house and on his shoulders. He hugs her as much as he can and kisses her forehead and her cheeks over and over until she’s giggling. He tells her he loves her every morning, afternoon, and night. Tells her how special she is, how smart and how pretty and how kind she is.

He accepts her, like Alex’s parents should have. He tells her that he’ll love her no matter what, that he’ll always have her back no matter what happens. He takes her to Pride when she’s four and lets a street artist paint rainbows all over her face. Tells her that her Uncle Alex was gay and Trevor had loved him so much. That Uncle Alex was so incredibly smart and kind, that he was the best listener, that he would have loved her too.

He never hurts her, like Reggie’s parents had. He insists, even in Dani’s worst moods, that they never argue in the house. Instead he has Carrie spend the night at the Molina’s, with Rose and Julie, while he and Dani go out to the middle of nowhere so Dani can scream. He never raises his voice at his daughter, certainly not his hand. He makes she knows she can come to him, when she’s scared or hurt, that she can trust him. He tells her that her Uncle Reggie used to hurt a lot and he’d bottle it up, which just made him sadder. That Uncle Reggie was so gentle and had such a big heart and loved so easily, that he would have given her the biggest, bestest hugs.

He supports her, like Luke had wished his parents had. He signs her up for every class she looks even remotely interested in, from science camp to violin lessons to soccer season to dance classes. He shows up to every school event and cheers embarrassingly loudly in the front row. He buys her brand new sneakers and jerseys and aprons and a hot pink guitar. He tells her that she can do anything and he will be right behind her, always. Tells her that her Uncle Luke was so bold, so brave, always trying new things and going after his dreams with a fierce determination. That Uncle Luke would have cheered louder than anyone no matter what she was doing.

It takes Trevor too long to notice that something is wrong with Dani.

He’d been so caught up in how happy he was with Carrie, how much he loved being a dad, how much music he was suddenly making out of his newfound joy. He’d thought she’d was ok.

She’d never been as close to Carrie as he was, though nothing like his own parents she had been distant with their little girl. As much as Trevor had tried to urge her, Dani hadn’t wanted to speak to anyone about her childhood, about her brother, about the drugs. But she still loved Carrie, still smiled so bright when Carrie was in the room, laughed so brightly when Carrie did anything at all.

Trevor will never forget the first time he’d seen her dance again, when Carrie was six. He’d added in a whole dance studio in the house just for his wife in the hopes she’d rediscover her passion, and now she’s using it. He watches her, slightly off balance from years out of practice, but beautiful nonetheless as she teaches Carrie the basics of ballet.

It had been the happiest he’d seen her since Alex had died. He’d thought everything was fine.

But in 2011, when Carrie is seven years old, Dani looks at him one day after dinner and says “I can’t do this anymore.”

Trevor says they’ll talk about it tomorrow, they’ll send Carrie to the Molina’s, they’ll go out to their spot, and they’ll talk about this. He tells her he loves her.

When he gets home from picking Carrie up from school the next afternoon, Dani’s side of the closet is empty.

There’s a letter waiting for him on the bed but he barely processes it. It basically boils down to her not wanting to be a mother anymore. Not wanting to be a wife. Not wanting this.

She doesn’t come back. She doesn’t call. Trevor and Carrie never hear from her again.

He waits two weeks after she’s gone before he finally sits Carrie down. Two weeks of her asking “Where’s Mommy?” and him having no clue how to answer her.

But Trevor does not want to lie to his daughter, to hide things from her. So he sits her down in the living room and tucks her into his side and tells her that Mommy has some issues and she felt that she couldn’t work through them here, and it isn’t fair, not even a little bit, and it was very mean, but they wanted what was best for Mommy so they had to let her go.

Trevor has never hated Dani until that moment, watching Carrie cry into his side. 

She left her. She left him. After everything they’ve been through together she couldn’t even say goodbye.

Carrie sleeps in his bed for the next two months. The next three years have her anxious when he leaves her sight for more than an hour. She’s terrified that he’s going to leave her too.

Trevor hates Dani so much even though he wishes, desperately, that she would come home.

He talks to his therapist about her, about the empty slot in his life. About everything she had meant to him. 

He stares at Alex’s drumsticks still perched on the shelf in the living room and wonders why she didn’t take that piece of her brother with her. Why she left them too.

He writes a series of sad, aching songs that do better than any of his songs since he started writing his own music.

But he and Carrie have to go on with their lives, have to move forward.

Two years after Dani has left them Trevor transfers Alex’s share of the money out of Dani’s now unused bank account and into one he’s set up for Carrie. Since he can no longer care for his sister, his niece will surely be just as good.

Trevor puts everything he has into his music and his daughter. He buys himself a helicopter, and while the media calls him flashy and full of himself, Trevor himself knows it’s so that he can get back to his daughter in case of emergency, no matter where in the country he is.

He invests in Carrie’s dance classes, when she starts showing a real interest. He drives her to lessons and hires choreographers who worked with famous artists and he watches every other lesson even though he has no actual feedback of his own to offer. He teaches Carrie his breathing exercises for if she gets nervous and takes her out for ice cream when she starts getting stressed about a new routine she’s learning.

He listens when she complains about school and Julie’s new bff Flynn who Carrie really does like too but she’s jealous and worried Julie will leave her behind. He stocks up on food for three girls for sleepovers and drags all the couches out of the way so the three of them can dance crazy in the living room. He lets her curl up in his side as she gets bigger and bigger, telling him about the things that bother her and her fears and he listens and he helps as best he can.

Things aren’t perfect, but they’re ok. Trevor is happy. And then the day comes.

It’s 2017. It’s officially been twenty years since his parents accidentally forced him into a contract that meant stealing the legacies of his brothers away from them. The gag order has ended. Chill Records -still going strong due to their impressive team of PR and lawyers- has no legal hold over Trevor anymore.

He can tell the world about Sunset Curve. About Luke and Alex and Reggie and their music, their lyrics, their songs that he had sang for the world.

But….

But Carrie is thirteen. Carrie is thirteen and writing songs of her own now, sitting in his studio chair, touching the necklaces on the wall in a ritual she picked up from him. She’s in the practice room every day of the week making her own choreography for a girl dance group she’s thinking of starting. She’s putting her heart and her soul into a career in music and dance and…

If the world finds out that Trevor Wilson stole all of his songs- no matter the circumstances he was under when it happened- then Carrie will never stand a chance.

All people will talk about is her father, his mistake, his theft. That will all reflect on her. Maybe she’ll find a way to overcome it, to make them see her talents. But it will be hard for her, and even then she will still have to deal with the world looking at her and wondering if she is just like her father. If she stole her music, her moves, her everything from someone else.

Trevor cannot do that to her. Not to his little girl.

Rose screams at him for an hour, about how he cannot do this to his brothers’ memory. How they deserve to have the truth known. How it isn’t fair or right or good.

Trevor knows this, but he will not back down. For Carrie, he will keep this awful festering guilt inside of himself until the day he dies.

Rose refuses to speak to him until he comes to his senses. Trevor knows she understands where he’s coming from, she’d do anything for Julie and Carlos, after all. But he also knows she’s furious on the boys’ behalf, as she has every reason to be. They’ll take some time apart, cool off, and then they’ll talk about this again.

But the world is cruel and Trevor has never been allowed good things.

Less than a year passes before he gets word that Rose is sick. He’s worried, of course, but Rose is a fighter. She’ll pull through, he’s sure. In the meantime, he sends flowers to the hospital and takeout to her family and he very discreetly pays her hospital bills when Ray isn’t paying attention.

Julie stops coming over to the house and Carrie walks around stiff-backed and shaking for a few weeks. He pulls her close, holds her, “You can talk to me kid.” He reminds her. She knows. She’ll tell him when she’s ready.

He tries to focus on his music, on Carrie, on everything else in his life. It’ll all be alright. Rose will be ok and they’ll work through their argument and then everything will be fine.

Ray calls him on a dreary morning in early July of 2019.

Trevor drops the phone before Ray has even finished, his studio fading before his eyes until all he can see is that cold, sterile hospital waiting room. All he can hear is his own screaming voice begging for his brothers.

Rose is dead.

Again, Trevor wasn’t there.

He sits in the back of the church at the funeral, watching Ray struggling to keep himself together as his children cry and fall apart. He thinks of three funerals, back to back, and how the world had never been the same again after.

He goes home that night and he holds Carrie and he does not cry, not yet, not in front of her, and he wonders if maybe he is cursed. If he pissed off some powerful entity in a past life that has seen fit to punish him by taking away everyone he has ever loved.

Carrie is no longer speaking to Julie. She does not tell him why. He doesn’t push her. She throws herself into making a dance group, Dirty Candi, and he throws himself into supporting her.

He does not write any songs. He can’t. Every time he picks up his guitar all he can see are those four, awful caskets.

He tries to keep going, like Rose had taught him. To keep pushing through. Interviews, talk shows, gigs, charity events. Going through the motions.

Carrie says Julie has stopped singing, and he understands, completely. Remembers those two years he hadn’t been able to touch his guitar without breaking apart. He hopes it doesn’t take her as long.

And then it’s been a year, and Carrie is thriving even if she’s sharper than usual, a harsher edge under her skin. And he’s maybe going crazy, with whispers in his ear and words on the bathroom mirror.

And then he sees Julie singing again, on Carrie’s laptop, and he’s so proud of her, for finding her love of music again, so happy. But then he sees the faces of her band, of his brothers, and he feels something cold clutch at his heart and refuse to let go.

Sitting in the Orpheum with Carrie watching as the brothers he buried twenty-five years ago sing their hearts out on the very stage they’d never gotten to play…. Trevor does not know how he feels. 

Terrified. Confused. Proud. Amazed. Awed. Happy. Lost. Alone.

That night, when they get home, Trevor sits on the couch and stares up at the ceiling. Carrie slots herself into his side like she’s been doing since she was little, her feet tucked up under one of his legs. He holds her close, squeezes, leans over to kiss her forehead.

“When I was a kid,” he starts, “I was in this band.”


End file.
